The challenge and scope

The challenge as given by KLM Cityhopper is the following:
Design a solution that enables KLM Cityhopper (KLC) to offer sustainable meals to users during their trip and helps identify key focus areas for KLC to work on, that make the catering ecosystem more sustainable.” Users in this sentence can mean either passengers or crew. Our concept focuses on passengers and is mainly directed towards economy class passengers, and it should be implemented by 2024.

We conducted field research at the KLM airport to observe the environment and different kinds of food during the flight. In the meantime, we interviewed the KLM staff to have a better understanding of the challenge

• Despite KLM's reputation as the most sustainable airline, many people were unaware of its sustainability efforts and the importance of weight saving. This lack of awareness led to low passenger acceptance of these efforts.

• KLM Cityhopper aims to be the most sustainable airline and values passenger contributions toward this goal. Effectively communicating their sustainability efforts and the reasons behind them could increase passenger willingness to contribute and accept any compromises made for sustainability.

Within the catering ecosystem itself, there are already a lot of stakeholders involved. Setting up a new process or concept often adds new stakeholders. The concept is designed for KLM Cityhopper and implementation, multiple departments within KLM would need to be involved. Interestingly enough, the stakeholder map involves mostly stakeholders from within KLM.

As mentioned before, the Hook model has been one of the main handles in this phase of the project. The model is broken up into phases and for each phase, ideas were brainstormed.
Brainstorming was initiated with “how might we” questions. For each question, a timer was set, and individually all of us came up with ideas.

Sustainably positive behavior would be rewarded with so-called sustainable points which could be spent in the Sustainable Reward Store. An app interface was created as well as food packaging. During the booking process, the new drink service is introduced and explained to the passenger. The food service is used to create awareness for sustainability onboard by designing a new food packaging

Using the average flight time of 1h16 and the number of flights of KLM Cityhopper an estimation of yearly benefits was made. On a yearly basis, the reduction in weight of only serving water on board would save approximately 215000kg of fuel which translates to 552 tons of CO2. Further benefits could come from sustainable behavior changes in passengers once awareness is created about the importance of weight saving in aviation.

Conclusion

Information architecture

Brainstorms often led to ideas and these ideas needed to become more graspable. For that reason, visualization sessions were done. In such a session we would set a timer and each team member would visualize their idea to later share with the team.

The weight of the drinks on board is a fixed number to calculate with for weight distribution, meaning that on a flight with 10 passengers the same number of drinks (full trolleys) are loaded as on a fully booked flight. This leaves a lot of potential for improvement and this is why this became our area of focus. The choice was made to not focus on food waste, another area with potential and important problems to solve, given the short amount of time left in the project.

It starts with creating awareness and providing a trigger to take action. The action (read: contribution to sustainability) will be rewarded with some sort of reward. This reward needs to be variable to keep the passenger’s interest and make the positive behavior a habit. At this stage, the passenger could even progress to promoting the program to relatives or friends, becoming the one who spreads awareness. And the functions was created and choose from this model

Matrix food vs. drinks, weight vs. waste. Green = Important problem to be solved. Yellow = Less significant problem. Red = This is not a problem.

We conducted the usability with users to get the feedback and find out the issues that need to figure out.

1.Add the sustainable reward point to the flight booking session.
2.User can have the overview understanding of how can get the sustainable point.

Interview questions

Key findings:

• The users are more focused on the ticket information itself and will check the detailed information of the drink voucher before they start the journey or when they arrive at the airport. They didn't notice the drink voucher in the App.

• In the App, there is insufficient information with the apparent signal that shows sustainability.

• The reward store in the App works. Especially when we add more selections of rewards and different users could find their interest based on their preference. In the second testing, two users mentioned that they would like not to use the drink voucher to get a high-value reward.

• The drink voucher is obvious to the user and has rich information , which helps them quickly understand how to use it.